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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#81

Post by iaseiadit »

yreg wrote: post #28
dougmwne wrote: post #7

I wonder if this is connected to the Vision Pro release. That’s another giant hardware fishing project that failed to meet the “vision” of an all-day wearable iPhone. Perhaps it became obvious that the car was in even murkier waters. And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.

AVP has not failed yet. Saying so today would be akin to stating that the iPhone failed in the fall of 2007. Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.

While some may have doubted the iPhone, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in the year it launched, and cell phones had already been established as an enormous and growing market.

VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#82

Post by closewith »

MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#83

Post by thomassmith65 »

Finally!

The idea that Apple had any business making cars was rooted in overconfidence and business school nonsense.

It was overconfidence to think that the shipping of tens of millions of smartphones meant the company was well-suited to make heavy machinery.

It was business school nonsense that birthed the idea. Consumers never needed Apple to make a car; the car presumably was to 'diversify' and placate investors worried about smartphone market saturation.

Tim Cook, and whoever else had a part in scrapping this dumb project, are probably mourning its death, but they ought to congratulate themselves.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#84

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
jcgrillo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and dis…

> can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.

[deleted]

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#85

Post by [deleted] »

tapoxi wrote: post #54
yreg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AVP has not failed yet. Saying so today would be akin to stating that the iPhone failed in the fall of 2007. Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.

I mean the hype around the iPhone was huge. There was obvious need for a phone that "runs OS X" and was part of the already massive iPod ecosystem. It sold itself. I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop…

[deleted]

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#87

Post by londons_explore »

gnicholas wrote: post #13

I really hope Apple continues its privacy-first ethos and offers an on-device LLM. It would also be great if they could use Handoff-like technology to let my (almost always nearby, almost always plugged-in) laptop do the thinking, instead of depleting the battery of my phone. I'd surely buy a bunch of HomePod minis if I could tie them into a local LLM.

And I hope the reverse. Most of my data I am happy to entrust to Apple, and I don't want them to release substandard not-very-smart products just because they're limited to AI models that only take a few gigs of RAM and can run on a single phone processor.

Please just use some huge models to make actually smart products and run them in the cloud if it isn't feasible to run them on-device. Perhaps have an 'offline mode', which runs small models (the google assistant already does that - and it's very noticeable that the online mode has very accurate speech recognition, whereas offline mode can only recognise basic words reliably).

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#88

Post by jcgrillo »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

If you look at the market cap of Ferrari, it's not crazy why Apple was considering this. They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%). You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure. I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.

Exactly, it looked to me like they were going for the supercar market (>$250k price tag, low volume) which (I guess naively) seemed pretty sensible..

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#89

Post by dougmwne »

tapoxi wrote: post #54
yreg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AVP has not failed yet. Saying so today would be akin to stating that the iPhone failed in the fall of 2007. Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.

I mean the hype around the iPhone was huge. There was obvious need for a phone that "runs OS X" and was part of the already massive iPod ecosystem. It sold itself. I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop…

I understand it, or at least what it could be. Picture something in eyeglasses or even invisible contacts or neural implant. It adds an AR layer on everything. There are no devices, no screens, no buttons. You look and think and the world responds. The Vision Pro is a clunky preview, but decently feature complete.

Utopian or dystopian, this is exactly the future that Apple, Meta and NeuraLink are chasing.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#90

Post by stevev »

MisterPea wrote: post #10

Cook's best trait is being reactive very well. What he lacks in the Jobs "magic", he has in the ability to react to industry incredibly well and do better than most. I have little doubt Apple is going to be a major player in AI, especially in the non-Nvidia hardware space after playing around with MLX

I disagree. They had a leading edge with Siri but failed to invest in AI over a car. This move is just correcting a vital mistake in time past. They’re playing catch up.
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